I believe you've misunderstood what the o.p. meant by 'smoothing'. It doesn't mean applying the halo effect and making X higher just because Y is high and close to it, or Y lower because X is low and close to it. It means evaluating both X and Y and resetting them to the most neutral justifiable values - which will almost always mean bringing them closer together, but that's a side effect, not the point of the exercise.